By yeti bear you mean Goss Harag, right? Because Lagombi is also *kind of* a Yeti Bear (a bit more marsupial like, but the "bear trio" is basically a bear and other animals mixed - stuff like Azuros and Volvidon for example), and Lagombi isn't new to Rise. 

But yea, assuming you mean Goss Harag, I FUCKING LOVE HIM too! 

This is something that was posted on Reddit. It's all the newcomers. Honestly, I love the designs of all of them now (except the monkey, he's just ok). It took me a while to come to Somnacanth and Magnamalo. Magnamalo I always was 50/50 on but seeing him in action his design is really complemented by the fact that he uses the Zinogre skeleton. Somnacanth is a monster where one small detail - his eyes - were bothering me originally. I wished his eyes were bigger to create a mixture of weirdness and creepiness, but also cuteness, which is something I really like from Monster Hunter, that contrast of feelings in relation to its monsters. As it stands, he's kind of just a creepy weirdo, but once again seeing him in action sold me on this concept. Especially when I noticed the claws, I like how they are like disturbing sloth claws. 

But I FUCKING LOVE Goss Harag, Almudron, and Rakna-Kadaki (the spider).

I do """hope""" they bring Bazelgeuse back, though. Again, he's basically the only somewhat hard "normal" monster in World. His bombing was really cool and unique. But yea, none of the other flyers were hard to me. 

Yea to answer Curl's question, i'm intermediate with my experience with the franchise. I put a lot of time into 4U, but that was between separate saves, so I got pretty far in the story but didn't beat it and thus a lot of the harder monsters I never experienced. World I beat the singleplayer but not the "true ending". Generations I played a decent amount of but never got much into. 

So I'd say i'm in the middle. This is the first one I plan to just put a shit ton of time into one save and experience the 'true' ending of these games (which is the Elder dragon stuff). 

Also I'd play with you but I don't have a Wii U anymore, and have never owned a copy of 3U :/ 

If Aknosom is actually as competent as this early footage shows (which honesty might not be the case), he actually looks like he could be a memorable challenge in the early game, which is nice. Again I hated how World kind of spoiled it's good monster designs by making the fights dreadfully easy. 

https://www.reddit.com/r/MonsterHunter/comments/lnyjbt/raknakadaki_clip_from_the_japanese_twitter/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

This new spider gameplay is really awesome. Not only using it's hatchlings as wirebugs but also having flamethrows *on the side* shows that this might end up being a pretty high tier newcomer, not just a somewhat annoying fight. Looks amazing!

Yeah it was Goss Harag I meant. I like all the new monsters so far but him and Almudron are the highlights to me, can't wait to fight them.

My Monster Hunter backstory is that I got hooked with Monster Hunter Tri on Wii and sank well over a thousand hours into it, bought a 3DS for MH4U and spent several hundred hours beating it but felt a little burned out on the series afterwards, and now more than five years later I finally feel ready to jump back in.

I'm interested in the game but I don't really know what to expect, and I'm never in the mood to watch the trailers and so on. I think a good question to start would be: what are the essential things you do in this kind of game? And from there, what are the most repeated activities in a timeframe of 100 hours? 

You hunt Monsters. A typical mission consists of tracking down a huge boss-type creature and battling it for an extended period until it finally goes down, then you use materials from its corpse to craft new weapons and gear to fight bigger, harder monsters.

In past titles, was it possible to fight the harder monsters first and then the low-tier ones? Or is it going to be possible in this one? That could be interesting. Although I don't know if I'm missing the point in something that makes crucial to fight monsters in a more sequential order. The basic premise is very tempting, though. Sounds like an ideal time-sinker. 

I'm not sure, but in past games you would sometimes have access to multiple new monsters at once and choose what order you take them on.

And yeah, the game is one hell of a time sink, it's the kinda of game where once you get into it you can easily spend hundreds of hours on it.

You can do that, but whether you should depends on how they structure the quests and items drops in this game. Playing World recently, the way it works is you can freely hunt any monster in a new area you've unlocked, but you won't actually unlocks quests to hunt harder monsters until you've progressed enough in the main storyline.

Quests are very important because you get a lot of bonus materials for hunting monster through quests, rather than through free expedition. But you do have that freedom regardless if you're more interested in the challenge.

I would say you are missing the point a bit if that's how you want to actively approach the game at all times, but there's definitely room for experimentation in Monster Hunter. Monster Hunter isn't an RPG per say, but the stats of your weapons and armor are still pretty important in making sure that your damage output and defense scales better with the increasingly challenging monsters. That's how the time sink works, you get to a new area, craft new armor and weapons, and now you can kill the harder monsters and move to the next area. Though it's important to note that most weapons and armor sets scale pretty well for a lot of the challenges in the area/beginning of the next area you got that armor set from, so it's not like you need to grind every monster, moreso the ones you choose and only when you hit a new wall.

Monster Hunter's difficulty isn't really a traditional "this is the super hard monster, and this is the easy monster, so I might as well skip the easy one". At least, not for the pre-World ones. Most monsters, even the early game ones, have some kind of check to make sure the player understands some game mechanic or know how to counter something. And of course depending on what weapon and armor set you have, some monsters might be significantly easier for you than it is for other people, and vice versa. That's why a lot of people have different "walls" in which they have to train to fight one specific monster, because everyone kind of has different experiences in what mechanics they have to learn or what builds and weapons they have to master. 

Though as previously mentioned by Shaunodon, you can go on expeditions, which are like a free roam you can do in the areas you've unlocked. However, and I may be wrong on this but, I don't think EVERY monster in that area is available as soon as you go on an expedition. Some are unlocked when you first encounter them in a story moment, for example. I might be confusing that with the mechanic though where challenging monsters you see in other stages eventually come over to previous stages you've been in. 

Glavenus feels like he should be a shoe-in considering he was in World's Iceborne expansion and from what I understand the monsters which were already in World are using the same textures and models in Rise (I.E. Rathalos and Rathian are using World's models). 

But if they don't get in, remember we always have free updates. I think World got ... 6 new monsters through free updates? 

Speaking of free updates, I kind of hope we get a crossover with Zelda, Mario, and Metroid that results in a new monster as well. They've done crossovers with those franchises before, but I don't think it was until Final Fantasy's Behemoth that Monster Hunter's main games actually had an entire monster made to crossover with a franchise. And they didn't just do it once, either, World had a crossover monster with The Witcher 3 too! It would be cool to see Ganon, Ridley, or Bowser as a huntable Monster in Monster Hunter (think Bowser is probably my least favorite choice of the three). Maybe not all three in one game, would make the list of updates kind of crowded with cameos, but still ... !

I don't expect it though, just woulld be cool.